#041: From Predicting Cardi B Hits to Raising $10M in Funding: Michael True's Journey in AI

I'm a very competitive person, logically and rationally competitive. I fucking hate to lose. Nothing drives me crazier than losing. And we have a winner's mentality and we know that there's a lot of companies out there that are trying to solve this problem. A lot of capital that's being deployed behind these companies. And so we got to wake up. We need to know exactly what we're going to build. We need to be on point. We need to communicate, hold each other accountable and just fucking make some moves.

Michael True, co-founder and CEO of Pression AI, is leading a transformative startup that is redefining data science and marketing analytics. His journey from a corporate tech role at IBM to heading a rapidly expanding company is both compelling and insightful, showcasing his relentless drive for innovation and success. In this episode, we look into the captivating story behind Pression AI's inception and development. Michael shares how he navigated the numerous challenges of early-stage startups while balancing personal well-being with professional responsibilities. Welcome back to Turning Pro, Season 2, Episode 4. Today we have Michael True, who's the co-founder and CEO of Pression AI. Thanks for joining us today.

Thanks for having me. Good to see you guys.

Want to jump right into it?

Yeah, let's do it. Hit it first.

You want to just give us a quick background on yourself and what you're working on?

Yeah, uh, so personal side, born and raised in Portland, Maine, youngest of 7, lived all over the country doing various jobs, but, um, most of the time was IBM, Oracle, did a quick stint at App Annie. I've just been in the analytics and AI space running around for the last 11 years or so.

And walk us through Pression. What does it do? Who is it helping?

Yeah, we work with e-commerce brands, so Shopify, Salesforce, Amazon, and just about to launch a retail model. I was actually doing a pod with the guy, what's his name, Rabah from Triple Whale last week. And he was like, and then Jon Snow. And we said, we found the one-liner. It's PressChamp. PressChamp will tell you what happened yesterday and based off of yesterday, what should happen tomorrow and then what could happen tomorrow based off of our recommendation systems on how they should reallocate their marketing mixes.

Oh yeah. And you're not just working with tiny brands. You guys are working with some crazy logos.

It's funny. When we first launched, like, launched the platform, we've been researching the model for 3 years before that. We launched the platform. I didn't know anybody in e-commerce at all. So I'm like chasing down anybody who I could get on the platform, free trial, $500 a month. Whatever you need. You guys get the game. You always need to land and expand. Um, and then, uh, progressively, just as you started getting bigger logos, I feel like other brands start to be curious about, well, why is Hexclad using Pression as their source of truth for their MMM, right? And, uh, yeah, it's been just growing really fast with some of the larger brands.

So you went from the—

you want—

you got as corporate as it can get.

There's somebody said the other day, we're— but we're redoing the website now, and, uh I've had at least 3 people tell me it was like, tell me you worked at IBM without working at IBM.

So good. My, my co-founder was at EY for a couple of years. I gave up my EY job 12 hours before my first day.

Stop it.

Yeah.

You're about to start.

You do 12 hours before my first day. I was supposed to do M&A consulting at EY Parthenon, and I emailed them 12 hours before my first day and said, I'm not going to be there. And the only communication that I had was a return label to send them back the laptop that they sent me. That was it. I was like, that confirmed everything I thought about this 100%.

So what were you thinking? Like, was— were you going to start—

did you, you—

did you not take the job to just go the entrepreneurial startup?

Yeah, but it was— I mean, there's— I guess there's a little bit of nuance in that I played hockey in college and then graduated in 2020, right? Uh, which my world was flipped upside down because we were— my senior year, uh, we beat Brown in overtime and we're still playing hockey, and then 2 days later the AD came in the locker room and said your season's over because of COVID And so I was actually potentially going to play professionally COVID just kind of flipped that upside down. And then EY actually gave all the incoming analysts a year to defer the job because they didn't know what was going to happen to their own business, right? So I took that year option and I joined an early-stage COVID testing startup that scaled to $50 million in revenue in 5 months, which was like a crazy experience. And then, uh, when I— after I left there, I had 3 weeks between then and when I was planning to go to EY, and I was out in LA visiting my 2 sisters, and I got put in touch with a friend who, a mentor of mine, put me in touch with another mentee of his. Like, you guys should meet. I was out in LA, we were talking, having breakfast, and he's like, what do you do? And I was explaining. He's like, do you have any interest in coming and doing BD at GoPuff? And I was like, kind of, sure. And in my mind, when I was still in college, I always thought that you had to go do 2 years of consulting or banking to then do BD at a high-growth tech startup, right? So when this opportunity presented itself, I'm like, why would I go one step back to go 2 steps forward? So I told him, I was like, I'm interested, but my job starts like in a week and a half. So I did like 7 interviews in 9 days, and they offered me like 2 days before my first day. I countered and then agreed 24 hours before, and then 12 hours before told EY that I wasn't coming.

And then you started—

so I went to GoPuff, uh, spent a year there, and then left and started Platter.

And when you were at GoPuff, were you doing who— BD, like who was your target?

I was doing partnerships, but what I was doing for the last 8 months was building out an e-commerce business unit called Powered By, which was essentially unlocking instant delivery for e-com websites, right? So the idea was like if you went to liquiddeath.com to buy a case of water, right, and the SKU basket was in the fulfillment center that was geofenced within your delivery address, GoPuff would be surfaced as your fulfillment option. So I spent all that time talking to Shopify brands, people in the e-com world, and that's how I kind of got into the space. I saw a lot wrong with how it was operating, at least from my perspective, and ultimately just took like a set of pain points that I saw and synthesized that into what is now Platter.

It's funny how those things come together.

Everything happens for a reason. But that was all to say you made a big transition from the corporate world into the startup world. What was the What was the reason for that?

Um, a lot of— I think the last year at IBM, we did, we did 334 flights in 3 years, and it was just a very depressing way to spend the end of your 20s, you know. It's like, I was living in San Francisco, your friends just stopped calling you, like, it's hard to date, do anything, you're just living on a plane. And, um, I went to New Zealand and Australia for 3 months and just like kicked it in a camper van. And, uh, I was at a, the Blues Festival in Byron Bay, and I'm like, I'm gonna just build the tech platform and sell to a record label with a clean cap table. And so I talked to like the CAA, the head of the data science over there, the Creative Artists Agency, and I was like, what's a problem that I could solve? And they're like, well, we have these mid-tier artists that are going to tour, and we know that there's little pockets of cities that they could stop in and make some money and get new fans. We built a little heat map that like scraped everything from like YouTube comments or like, come to my city, right? You could find a lot about like, uh, fan bases. And so we created a heat map that just ranked cities and then pulled in some bands in town data for like venues. And the goal was to be able to like predict the most profitable tours, who should open up for them in the— like, like a SoundCloud rapper is like local in the area, he's got like a good fan base, that should be opening up for for you, right? And then COVID hit and touring went away. But the big move was just like, I was burnt out, man. I did this for a long time and sold, you know, we did a 5-year, $750 million contract with Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield. It was kind of like the last check the box. And I was like, all right, I want to try to go do something different.

And this was what, 2, 3 years ago?

This was in 2000. Wow, dude. Yes, 2019. I incorporated in 2018, and I finally quit my job in 2019.

Wow.

So funny. It's like I was burned out, so I tried to go do something harder.

Exactly right. I was like, dude, I was selling all these huge deals, and I know I could talk to a data scientist about machine learning very well, right? And I'm like, all right, well, why can't I just go sell something that's my own and have it be on a cap table versus waiting for a commission pay? Came in, essentially. Yeah. And, um, that's kind of the journey, man.

We were talking about this in the conversation, uh, with Eli before this, about the idea of burnout.

Yeah.

And I think it's so funny because when I was like working for someone else and I'd go a little too past 8 to 6, yeah, I was like, I'm burning out, I gotta take a week off. And for the past 3 and a half years, I've been pulling like 12-hour days and I've never felt burnt out once.

Dude, you're— you are a beast on like follow-up Slack availability. Like, thanks. No, not just saying it to say it, like, I'm very happy, loyal customer and sending, you know, people leads over there.

Shout out Verbatim.

Shout out to Verbatim. Like some serious— I was really nervous about taking the jump into like— at IBM nobody gives a shit when you're just— sorry, nobody—

you can swear.

Nobody's okay. Yeah, I said okay, I'm 36, I want to swear.

I won't tell your board.

Shout out to Taylor and Bruce and Cody. Um, but the ego, uh— oh, it's true. So I was like, nobody gives a shit about a DB2 database at IBM. On LinkedIn. Nobody wants to talk about that. Nobody wants to see that. Nobody wants to see me on Twitter. And I hadn't had exposure to like putting myself out there. And so when these guys were like, yeah, we're going to start blowing up your LinkedIn, I had like this huge pit in the bottom of my stomach. Like, felt awkward, right? Like putting yourself out there is on such a consistent basis. I was thinking like maybe every, every other week we'd toss something out. Like, these guys get shit going out like every other day. Um, but it's working. Right. And like, you guys have just done a kind of dovetail to your original statement of burning out. But like, I had to say, like, you guys are not burning out and it's great to see. And like, the results are great.

Thanks, man.

It's fire.

I want to talk about pace and velocity for a second because before I met you, even heard about Pression, I met up with Will. Yeah. When he was still at his last job and we got some souvlaki in San Francisco.

I love that.

And he was like, you guys should know about Pression. Yeah. I was like, What's the MO? He told me what you guys do and I was like, no, but what's different? And he was like, they just move fast. And then when I— Taylor and I were grabbing coffee in Williamsburg.

Yeah.

And I was— and she was like, we just did this deal. And I was like, how are they different? How are they good? And she's like, they move crazy fast. They're no bullshit about it. I was like, all right. And then I talked to you and I was like, I get it.

Yeah.

So tell me about the importance of— because it's, it's not an easy thing to show up to every call, every interaction, every day and like push that velocity. And so how do you think about that?

I think a lot of it comes down to culture. It really does. We've hired someone, we've been fortunate enough to hire some fucking mind-numbingly brilliant people on the engineering and product and machine learning research science side. And they come from places where I feel that there's not a level of appreciation for what they're doing. A lot of them come from, you know, a lot of people from Grubhub and Bloomberg and some of the, you know, Facebook or Meta. And we've just, my co-founder said to me early on, he's like, dude, we're gonna have a culture, and it aligns with both of us, is happy people build great products. And Tony, shout out to Tony, our director of engineering, was at a baseball game with his son yesterday at 11 in the morning on Slack, sending pictures of the game. People are loving it, send us more photos. Tony's submitting there at fucking midnight Jira tickets, like pumping things through, right? And so there's that element, but I also feel like, I'm a very competitive person, logically and rationally competitive. I fucking hate to lose. Nothing drives me crazier than losing. And we have a winner's mentality, and we know that there's a lot of companies out there that are trying to solve this problem, a lot of capital that's being deployed behind these companies. And so we got to wake up. We need to know exactly what we're going to build. We need to be on point. We need to communicate, hold each other accountable, and just fucking make some moves.

I love that. You'll appreciate this. It's an offhanded comment, but a friend of mine, I was talking to his dad, very successful entrepreneur. And he was telling me a story about hiring someone, and he looked at a younger— like, younger kid across the room early in his career, and he's like, why should I hire you? And the kid looked at him and said, if you put me in a room with all the other candidates and turn the lights off and put a tennis ball at the center of the table, I'll come out with that ball 10 out of 10 times. I was like, that is the coolest fucking thing I've ever heard.

Where is this guy, right? Let me find you.

And I like— so I can— I mean, I can empathize with that because I was, you know, an athlete in my last life, and it basically— when hockey stopped, it's like, well, how do— where do I put all that energy and competitive nature, and it went into like business building. So I feel very similar— similarly to you in the sense that like I just like to win.

Yeah, there's no— there's just no— you're gonna lose, you need to notice. Like when you lose, why? I want to know every, every detail about why we lost and like why we're never going to lose that way again. Yeah.

And it's also the thing that you said that I love, because we try to do the same thing, is like you build a culture around output, not around like clock in, clock out, and time, and like people faking that they're working at a certain hour just to like prove to you that they're doing it. It's like, if you want to go hang out at 11 AM on a Tuesday, go for it. As long as your job is done at the end of the day and whatever you're responsible for gets— responsible for gets executed. Like, I don't need to micromanage or watch that. And I do believe when you let people perform in their best self, you get the best output as a business.

Agreed. I think there's also different types of competitive drives. Like, everyone has their own style of it. And something I did appreciate about you guys early on is that I don't know if this is radical candor exactly. Yeah, but you can bring pace and you can bring competitiveness, but it needs to stay above the line. Very direct communication, no holds barred. Versus I've worked with a lot of people in the past. I'm sure we've met a lot of people that are very competitive and want to win. Yeah, but then it can dip below the line and then it's like you, you pointing fingers. What happened here? And so how did you— because I'm sure your style of competition has also evolved over the years.

It's It's interesting, like the competitors are now starting to come at us, right? And that's a good thing, right? People are— when people are talking about, you know, that you're doing something right. And, um, there's— it's funny where you're a bunch of nerds battling over competitiveness of math, right? It's, it's the math Olympics. The only thing that matters is, like, you know, shout out to the MTA providers in the Northbeam, Triple Whales, Rockerboxes of the world out there. They've built a really great pixel and platform to do multitouch attribution. But when you go into a media mix model and probabilistic optimizations and forecasting, the only thing that matters is the math, right? You can have the ugliest dashboard and the best math because when you tell somebody, hey, you should go do this and this is probably gonna happen, right? So it's an interesting battle of like, it's not over pricing, it's not over like UI/UX, it's, hey, how granular can you go on measurement? How accurately can you backtest and forecast? How quickly can your models be when you rerun the model, refresh the insights? What is the onboarding experience like? And people are saying to us now, like, hey, the typical model training time of the MMs that exist in the ecosystem can take weeks. And our training time, I think Cody's going to get this under, depending on the size of the company, but anywhere from 12 to 14 hours. 4 hours. Like, it's unheard of for— and doing it at the campaign level is just unheard of. So people are saying, um, and listen, I respect it. Like, you're gonna come out and find, find a spot you can poke and poke it. But, um, how can they have reliable artificial intelligence models if they're only taking hours to train, right? And it's better math, right? We use 4 models that break apart all of the data into tens of millions of little models that all talk to each other and they learn and they train versus taking a huge dataset and running it through one big model and taking that time for that model to train. And so I thought it was a good aside of like from a competitive perspective, we like to go at people the exact inverse. Well, it takes them a long time. The onboarding is extensive. The math of their saturation plots is wrong. You shouldn't be using linear regressions. You should be nonlinear regressions. And here's why. And so, you know, it's been fun fighting it out on the nerds, on the nerd front.

Yeah. Tell us, walk us through the process of raising capital.

That was a very interesting process for sure, because I'd never done it before. And like, dude, I grew up in Portland, Maine. Like, there was no VCs in my backyard. There was no tech in my backyard. Like, I had no idea about any of that stuff growing up.

I love it there, by the way. I went for the first time 3 weeks ago.

You went to Portland?

Yeah, with my college roommates. Dude, stop it. It was because one of my roommates is from Maine originally, so 4 roommates and all of our significant others. 8 of us went and rented a house on the water for like 3 days, and it was amazing.

You guys go to downtown Portland?

Yeah, of course.

Oh, the Old Port, dude. The restaurants and bar scene down there, it's awesome.

It's bringing back memories from the early 20s.

I was kind of—

not to, not to deter you, I just like, I feel like when you meet someone who's like, oh, I was from Portland, Maine, I don't know that many people from there, like, I gotta slide that in. Let them know.

Never happens. It makes— I'm so proud of actually being from Maine. Like, I'm so happy you just said that.

We made lobsters. Like, we, we made it. We got live lobsters and we cooked them, and it was the coolest experience, and it was fantastic.

Did you You steamed them in a— Yeah.

You steamed them up. With ocean water. You gotta use ocean water and not regular tap water. I learned all about it.

100%. Wow, dude, you did it right too. Yeah, I'm heading back there on Sunday morning for Father's Day. So raising capital, yeah. So I'm like, how the hell do you do? I didn't know what a safe was. I didn't know what a convertible note was. And I went and had this idea and I got told no. 112 times before I got my first $25 angel check.

Is that actually the number? 100?

I documented everyone. Yeah, yeah, they're still in my investor email. It's kind of petty.

Oh, you got to do it. No, you got to keep it there.

100%.

You should send them more frequent updates.

Yeah, well, I mean, all the updates are coming through the work they're doing on my LinkedIn, right? People are like, these— we're getting hit up by a bunch of like top-tier VCs as well.

Really?

Um, yeah. Anyways, I love what you guys are doing. Tell them if you—

if they want a conversation, they have to send you leads.

I'm not taking any more conversation unless it's like a— yeah, it's a very good point.

A check comes with 25 brands.

Let's see how many brands you can get in front of us.

Come on, yeah, put it to the test. Change the perception of venture capital value to founders. Just kidding, I love Taylor, Bruce, and all the— we got lucky with our investors, they're incredibly helpful. Raising capital was hard, dude. Again, we got— before. So that touring thing shut down. That was kind of the missing piece here. Touring shut down. We're like, I'm like, what do I do? I'm gonna go— what, this whole thing that I built is out the window? The global head of publishing from Spotify— so if you're on Spotify, he made sure you got your publishing rights and you got your royalties— called me, says, don't shut it down yet. Measurement in music does not exist because Google Analytics for last click that everybody loves, there's no Google Analytics behind Spotify and Apple Music Pandora. And so when you're going to promote a song, you have Cardi B, the heterogeneity, I mean, the randomness, the amount of variety of data associated to an artist could be virality on TikTok, things. It's way bigger than just a consumer brand. So the problem is really hard to say, well, what was driving the stream on Spotify or Apple? Was it the paid spend? Was it the viral TikTok dance they're doing? Was it Cardi going on the James Corbin Show or performing at Coachella? And announcing the awareness of her song coming up. Like all of these things impact that. And so I met my co-founder Cody and he's the LeBron James of research. We got really, really lucky. Bar none in the game, there's not one better research scientist to go solve this thing. I mean, he was at— when I met him, he had just left Grubhub where he was their global head of research science and AI. He was predicting orders by zip code in New York City to properly staff their drivers so so the food wouldn't be cold across 700 markets at 92% accurate. Like, what? It's like an Uber Eats problem plus an MMM marketing problem, like, all combined into one.

Wow.

He rewrote their LTV model from scratch. So I'm sitting there, and he's like a bro. He holds a weightlifting record in California. He was a walk-on D1 lacrosse player. He's like professional League of Legends. Dude, we just got matching tats together too.

No way.

Oh my gosh.

Is that a formula?

That's a question, dude. That's so funny. Are you really AI co-founders if you don't have the matching tats? Come on.

Wow.

He, um, I know I'm going off on a tangent here, but like, no, this is what people want to hear.

So he was like, so I'm like, dude, can you tell me your experience about fundraising? Dude, look at my matching tattoo about AI with my co-founder.

You gotta give the people what they want, man.

And so it was awesome. Um, so they go on. So I'm like, can you solve it? He was like, listen, this would have been solved if you take a— if we take an existing research paper and just try to write code on it. And that's what a lot of the AI companies do. Now they take an LLM and they put a dashboard on top, but it's not real. Before that, it was like a research paper and you'd write code associated to it. Cody's like, I'm writing my own research paper. I'm building something that doesn't exist here today because Warner Music Group has $7 billion and a whole data science team, and I'm sure they've tried all the research papers. I need 4 months. I was able to get into the C-suite at Warner. We got all the historical streams and spend and variables from Cardi B, Roddy Ricch, A Boogie, a whole bunch of artists. And said, could we predict their past songs blind? So we trained on everything. And then it was funny, it was Cardi B's WAP song, which we'll talk about in the fundraising process. But could we predict WAP based off of all of the learnings before WAP and the spend for WAP? Could we predict how many streams? We came in for that one at 93%. That was the lowest. And then from there it was Roddy Ricch was 98%, A Boogie was like 96%. And then we started running an optimization model that said, hey, if we had that same budget for Cardi B's WAP song and these songs and we spent, and our model spent it, here's how many more streams this song could have gotten. When you launch a track in music, the goal is to have the highest peak because it kind of flattens out from there. And when it goes into their catalog after 18 months, so these things are printing cash. And so the incremental difference between 10 million— 10 million streams on the first month to 15 million streams compounding over time makes a drastic difference, right? And so February of 2021, she's coming out with this song. It's going up and it's up and it's up What's up? And we were watching it, and it was March. And I remember Cody called me. He was like, dude, the model is 97% confident. If Atlantic Records is ever going to take a bet on us, it's now. And I got in touch with their GM and said, models— they took the spend recommendation. We hit it at 96.3% accurate. That was the conduit to us going to raise capital because the very next month, Apple announced iOS 14.5. And we're like, dude, this model can work. It could optimize submission forms for a healthcare company. It could optimize downloads for an application. It could optimize credit card signups for MasterCard, bookings for Priceline, or it could optimize spend for an e-commerce store, Amazon store, retail store. And that was our first. We went out and we raised $2.3 million on a pre-seed. Because when we were working with Warner, we were taking screenshots and putting it on a Word doc and just sending it over like a fucking summary or synopsis or whatever, right? We're like, we need to build the infrastructure, we need to build the platform. And so we raised $1.7 million, and then we're like, oh shit, this is taking a little bit longer than you think. So we raised another $5 million, and that's when I feel like— and I'm curious to get you guys' perspectives on the kind of go-to-market side from the early phases, like where your experiences was— is I wanted to go out and try to get a gazillion people on a waitlist and on a platform to try it. But I was like, I want to go talk to these marketers. I want to explain what I'm doing. And I want the ones that are going to believe in the secret sauce of what we're building. And I want them to be on a Slack channel with us. I want them to be giving us feedback. And we will build the best fucking infrastructure dashboard and model for you. But that is the give to get for you guys to partner with us. And that was phase 1 of the fundraise.

And what was phase 2 with Headline coming in?

Phase 2 was Bloomberg. Oh. And that's when we raised $4.5 million with Bloomberg, which was interesting because we had those, like, I think we got 8 design partners, and we hadn't really launched. We hadn't launched publicly to the market yet. And so we converted them at a very low price point to just show that traction price point, but the venture market Tankt. You saw people doing 75x multiples on top line revenue and like absurd things, which I'm sure some of these people are like biting themselves in the ass on down rounds and like layoffs. Like, that was a big bet in that time. So it tankt, which is a blessing in disguise for us. But I'm saying, dude, we're making like $20K ARR and we have this great platform. And so we went to the investors, we're like, listen, we don't have the capital. We proved to Warner, Warner licensed it for several million dollars, right? That was a proven point. And we said, bring in statisticians. We have the best math that exists to go solve this. We'll open it up to you. And so, they brought in some people from Wharton, Capital One. They ripped our math apart and they were like, it's the real deal. Like, it's worth the money for them to go execute or go to market. So, we raised the $4.5 million and we launched last, We kept the team small too. We went from 8 to 11 over last year, kept it really small. Shout out to the engineers, man. I don't know how you guys do that. It's fucking insane. Seriously, I'm just like, how did that be possible? And so we went out and we hit the market and nobody— I was like, dude, we have the best math. Everybody's going to come running to us. No marketing team. This is literally our verbatim, our first marketing team. And nobody knows who I am. I come from IBM. It's like big tech. I'm not in the club yet. So I did a roadshow, but it went slow. We went really slow for the first February to September, April to September, $200,000 ARR. And then I did a conference circuit and we launched the optimizer that told people what to do. And then it just went bonkers. It went from like $200,000 to $1 million in ARR in 43 days, which was just an incredible incredible experience to see the wind channel and slacks going off. And we're talking big, like the Cozy Earths and the Hexclads and Nudes. And agencies are starting to give us deals. And it was a really exciting time. And then one of our existing investors called me and just— I'm sitting there on my laptop, big thing in my office down in Miami. My buddy walks in on the screen and an email pulls up and it's a fucking term sheet for $10 million. I had no idea it was coming. Whoa. It got preempted. And then I went out and we didn't shop it really hard, right? I really loved our existing investor there, and we wanted to get the right next investor. But I talked to some of the bigger funds, and they're like, dude, I get it. This is crazy growth, but we want to see 6 more months, right? And I'm like, dude, these engineers are literally going to drowned of like suffocation of this. I was like, we need more capital. We need to have them scale and get more resources. So yeah, we met Taylor from Headline and I was like, immediately at breakfast she was like, I've had 5 brands in the last 2 weeks say that you're the most vital part of their tech stack. And I've been in this space forever, right? She's built her own attribution models. She's been waiting to make a bet in this space. And her and I just had such a strong like friendship vibe. I could take a ride with her as a road trip for 5 hours, and we wouldn't have to say a word, and we wouldn't feel uncomfortable. That's kind of like a litmus test for me of like, if you're uncomfortable in a relationship-wise. And yeah, they all came together with Bloomberg, our existing cap table, and Headline. And for us, it was a no-brainer to ask Taylor to join the board. While she's still earlier in her career, everybody in the back channels like, this is the next rising star in the space. And she's just been fantastic.

I mean, I think from an outsider's perspective, it's interesting how you're like, you came into this industry with no relationships. But like when I was kind of just watching it, because we had coffee a while ago.

Yeah.

And then Jorge. And then you, you like knew all the people, right? You're like doing all the things with all the people that have been in this space. I mean, granted, I've only been in this space for less than 2 years also.

So like similar to you in that sense, you built up a crazy network as well.

Yeah. I mean, like I would say semi-good probably, but like better every day. Yeah, 100%. But it was like, then I would watch you and it's like, you're with all those figureheads that have been in the space for a decade who know everyone and anyone and like. You're their tool of choice in that vertical that's being pushed everywhere. And I was like, damn, this guy, regardless of the fact that he didn't know anyone when he came, he knew who to go to and who to latch on to very quickly to like put the foot on the gas to get to where you are now.

It's like going to high school, showing up at a new high school.

Seriously, it's like, which lunch table do I want to be at, dude?

I was sitting there at the SendLane conference, was like my first big conference I went to with a shout out to Jimmy from SendLane. We're gonna actually sponsor that again. And we had my first chance to speak This actually story is fucking hilarious. We went out there, but I was watching the podcast. I was like, Jason Panzer, the guy from Ridge, the guy from Simple Modern, and they're having the podcast. And, you know, my homie Nick Shackelford was moderating it. And it's like, it seemed like these huge, like, larger than life figureheads of like that have built and scaled these like crazy brands. And it's analogous to like the jocks of a high school, if you will. But they've built these brands, they've built great tech stacks. They have such a good perspective on how to be an operator of these brands. And they are just out there, you know, really pushing out really good information. And when your name is attached to that, it helped grow that network. But here's a really funny story about this Sun Lane conference. So I don't smoke weed, right? It's just, I get quiet, I get, it's just not my thing, right? I used to when I was in high school, whatever. And so I'd never, and I never spoke to on stage for in the e-commerce. So I'm going on stage with Zach from Triple Whale and somebody else, right? And, uh, Nick, Nick Shackelford launches this brand called Breeze, right? It's crushing it, crushing it, dude. And so he, um, he has all these buckets around. I thought it was a CBD drink, so I crushed— no way, dude.

Oh God, before you went up to speak?

45 minutes before I went up to speak.

Shut the fuck up.

I gotta see a video.

I was absolutely lit on that stage, and I'm quiet I guess I'm like whispering.

Oh my God.

So like Connor from, uh, Hexclad, like we just were starting to like build that relationship with Hexclad. Um, he teased me up a softball of a question and I just sat there. I didn't, I didn't process and I just sat there and I just stared and I didn't know what to say.

This is not a real story.

The fuck are you doing? It was unbearably painful. Unbearably painful. It was my first time ever, like, putting my face up.

Yeah, but that— I mean, there's no better way than that for the first one, cuz now you're unbothered probably when you go up there, cuz like, it can't be worse.

It could not— it could not be worse. Yeah, my eyes were all glazed over, and I had my former, like, head of sales there. He's like, dude, your eyes are so fucked. I'm like, oh, great, dude. Like, this is exactly what I need to be hearing.

Red eyes on camera just staring at you.

It's a good product.

That's so good.

It's a great product.

Yeah, he brought some over a few months ago and we had a bunch of people over and I really liked it.

It's a good thing. Yeah, it's a really— we've been throwing golf tournaments.

I was just gonna— that's what I was gonna say to finish. I'm like, every other week it's, uh, Mike and Nick are playing golf somewhere.

It's one of those things, it's like everybody— there's a lot of dinners and such and I love going to them. You can really sit down, but I'm like, all right, well, where's the golf, right? Like, my dad and I have been golfing together for 33 years, and it's been near and dear to my heart. And it's such a great place for people to come together and like—

my co-founder's a golfer, shoot the shit.

Oh really?

Yeah, he just broke 80 for the first time.

Um, we're gonna do another one up here in New York. So if you guys— in New York, we're doing one, uh, um, in the Hamptons or something? No, the, um— I shouldn't know this when I'm going on a podcast to promote these things. Um, I'm just talking about— I'll get back to you guys. Wes, Wes, we're doing it with a company called Flex as well. And their whole team does kind of the back end stuff. But we're going to do one in New York, and we probably got a couple brand people for you who would toss the logo on too. We'll figure something out too. I'd love to. Yeah, yeah, your co-founder come out and play. Oh yeah, the, uh, yeah, golf is fun. Do you guys golf?

I dabble. I do want to talk about— I, I love the idea of stacking things that you love to do with like people that you want to hang out with, and nothing like— I, I love a good coffee meeting as much as anyone else.

Yeah.

But when you're able— I mean, you have like a sauna and a cold plunge on your roof when you're doing something, when you're doing something hard, we got it.

We're going to do— we're going to do like a platter, press in cold plunge, sauna, hang out next time you're back.

Saturday. If you guys do— if you guys jump Saturday, I already sent you the link. Oh, did you really? Yeah. I'm being a good podcast.

No, you're good.

You're good.

Post-podcast, we can do like saunas every time. It is such a special thing when like, even if you know someone very lightly.

Yeah.

All of a sudden you're doing like a hard thing and sweating with them.

Sure.

It's— you're immediately best friends.

100%, dude. You guys can relate to like, I—

I'm actually just going to pull it up for you verbatim because I just made a post about— no pun intended— I actually just made a post about this like last week.

What about like sweating it out with someone?

It was like I went to— I went and did a boxing class with— uh, do you know Jay from 10,000? The brand here, right here. There's like— I literally put struggling to build deeper relationships, question mark. Do hard things with people when you meet them the first time. Grinding in a workout is a much more memorable first experience than sitting at a bar having 3 beers.

Bar. That's a bar.

It's just like, you'll, you'll remember it more, I think, when you, when you go through a little bit of adversity alongside someone, especially getting shit-faced at the bar with somebody.

You're definitely not going to remember it.

Yeah. And look, I, I stopped drinking like a year and a half ago, and I have nothing against people who do it or anything about it. I just think that for me it was like, okay, if I'm going to build a company and I know that part of my job is networking, like, how can I align my interests simultaneously with the people that I want to be meeting, which is why I started doing things like this. And like, podcast is another great example. Like, I love talking to people way fucking smarter than me, and you can like— there's a lot of value from it, right? You get like content that you can post, you can actually learn something and personal brand build at the same time.

Yeah, and build like meaningful relationships. Yeah, like, like, it's funny, I'd never met him in person, right? It's like, we chat so often, he's like, you know, he's a guy's guy, chilling to shoot the shit and stuff, and like It's nice to like put faces to names and communicate and sit down and talk. And, you know, we had met a few months ago and like, it's great to come back and hear like, I want to kind of get more of the latest on your side too. But it seems like things are ripping and running for Platter as well. You guys are hiring and feeling that, that inflection point right now.

Yeah, it's real. I feel like this is the first time for real where I'm like, all right, it's actually like happening. Yeah, it's been fun. I mean, the hiring thing has been quite a journey. I will double in team size over the span of like a month or two, which has been a lot. But I think it's cool because when we first started, I told myself that our ask to brands is pretty big in the sense that like, I'm asking you to port your entire existing website over to Platter.

Yeah.

And we're working with— we're not working with new brands. Like all our brands are doing, you know, at least $1 million on their e-com store.

Sure.

So when you think about going to someone who has an existing infrastructure and trying to get them to switch their store over from the outsider's perspective, you're like, that's kind of a big ask. I don't really know how many people are going to be like down for that. Like, I'm already doing $10 million online. Why am I going to rebuild my entire e-com store? And then when it started resonating and like top of funnel was not our issue, I was like, oh, this is wild. I never expected this to happen.

Yeah.

But look, it's like the natural progression of building. You got to course correct. Like we're getting good traction. So now we have to make sure we can meet the demand of what's happening.

So like a true entrepreneur right there, dude. You know, it's verbatim. You've been doing the amount of logos you have on your site and the people you've got to get.

Pressions. New look, new logo on there.

You have to get our new ones.

It goes left.

I know I can't. I was— that was really hard to say, to do a rebrand, to be honest with you. Was like, that was that little circle thing.

Oh, you changed the logo?

I was like, just Cody and I and two guys in a digital garage grinding it out and screen shares and all that shit. Like, and now it's like the website has to go, everything needs to get updated. But, um, yeah, when we were introduced to you via Taylor, I believe.

Yes.

Yeah, Taylor.

Will or Taylor?

Will or Taylor. What's your website? I'm like, dude, Everybody and their mother on your, on your website.

But the best part about his website is the simplicity of it.

Oh, it is.

It's nothing but like one line. Here's what we do, and if you're unsure who we've worked with, just look at these 200 logos. He actually, he texted me like a week and a half ago and he's like, dude, you gotta update your website. We used to have like a rotating brag bar.

Yeah.

For like logos.

Yeah.

And he's like, no, you need to like stack a couple lines and just put all the logos on there. We just shipped it today.

Did you really?

Yeah. So instead of, instead of having the brag bar, it's just like, I don't know, I think we have 3 lines of like 6 or 8 logos and it's just like 20, 25 logos all static instead of it like rotating.

Yeah, I think it depends on the—

I'll trust this. I'll trust the social proof guy on like how you should be doing it.

It does depend on like the technical complexity of your product. Yeah, because if something is more like— we couldn't have a two-liner if we didn't run content.

Totally.

There are like— Crescent like needs a lot more content.

Explainability to it.

Yeah, but I do think for the most part, like once people have seen you around, like you're hustling around the ecosystem, you know the right people. Now, you're hosting events, and you're doing go-to-market activities, and people are starting to come in. Once people have heard about you, all they really care about is who you work with, did they have a good experience, what were the results, do they like you, do they like the team? And then after that, as long as they grok the core product, that's kind of all they care about through the funnel.

I couldn't agree with you more, dude. I feel like at the beginning stages, there was— because I've been selling for a long time, I know how to earn trust up front and have those conversations. And you're the founder of the company, if you're you're going to take a risk. You have direct access to— something goes wrong, you can hit me up. It's like, as companies scale, I would love to have it always be that way. But the— dude, I just lost my train of thought. Sorry, everybody. Long day.

That's the best part of being able to edit a podcast.

Can you guys edit that out?

We can, but I feel like it's more authentic to keep it in there.

Keep it. Yeah.

We're all about authenticity. We're all humans.

I got a lot of shit on my mind today, and one of it just popped right— I got things going on for like personal lives. I got Verizon calling me. I'm at this conference. We're meeting with Bed Bath Beyond this morning. I'm like, podcast. I got 3 suitcases over there ready to go to Europe.

But this is— but this is all— this is what it's all about.

It's all about— yes.

I don't know, you could be sitting at your cubicle at IBM still, but like, you're like that Biden meme just sitting in your chair. Did you see the— did you see the one that just got posted a couple days ago? Was it a concert? What was it?

Oh dude, I couldn't watch that.

And the meme was like, it was like when the mushrooms hit or something. And it's just like him like standing there like this. And I was like, it's like our country is an SNL skit.

Oh my God.

So bad.

Everyone's like pulling it up and pointing it up, doing like, everybody's in rhythm doing the same dancing.

And Kamala's next to him dancing.

Well, one question I have for you is we talked about like speed and pacing. Yeah. I think for a lot of companies that can be your differentiator. You just move faster and you do things faster. Pushing, if it's a similar product. And so I'm curious for you and like a lot of people that are flying around taking meetings, you came with your luggage because you want to do this and we can build content from it. Pacing is awesome, but when you get tired, how do you still show up with a fast pace?

I will take a personal day, block it off.

What do you do in that day?

I run. I love to run. Yeah, I'm down like by 35 pounds, dude. I got, I got really unhealthy like last year during this personal stuff. Like, the is just— we're all, we're all fucking humans. Like, it happens. And, uh, I was burning myself out because when we went and had that hockey stick, dude, that was 16-hour days, 6 days a week, back-to-back calls, and then trying to get the deals done because I took over. I ended up owning the sales process again after that, and while we were searching for somebody else. And so doing that plus just all of the other day-to-day stuff of the— it was fun. And then the fundraise hit, and then you needed to maintain these clients and you need It was just a very unique time that I will never take. Blessed with the opportunity to go through the experience, but I would be lying to say like it wasn't mentally tolling on your physical health and your mental health. And after that, now that we have kind of a team and where everything's in people like Will Holtz to come in and just like run the ship tight, you know, now I'm able to still grind it out. But I wish in hindsight that I prioritized that in, in balance, like, those deals still would have gotten done. Like, I was just so obsessed with, like, making it happen and moving fast.

But you need that.

It's so easy.

It's so easy to say that. And after the fact, like, I wish I would have been, you know, more healthy. But, like, I don't know, every single, every single successful founder who's jacked, it's because, like, they already made it. Like, you know, you know who I keep giving shit to now is, do you know Aaron Spivak?

Oh yeah, I met him.

He's like, he's like a trainer living in his house now, and he's like, he's like, for the next 90 days just getting completely jacked. The guy's like cooking all his food and doing all his workouts. I'm like, He earned the right to do that because he treated his body like shit for 7 years to build Hush, and now he's like, I want to get myself right.

Yeah.

Would he have been able to have as much success as he had had he been like prioritizing all the wellness stuff? Probably not.

Yep.

Um, so I think hindsight's, you know, it's— I don't know, I wouldn't— I would look at it more as like an experience, and you're just kind of falling forward and evolving.

Yeah.

But I'm curious, like, in your current day, like, what are your non-negotiables to make sure that you're prioritizing those things?

So I run, I run like a madman every day. Oh dude, the personal, like every— I'm so excited to go run the West Side Highway tonight on the— as the sun sets. When I used to live here in Christopher Street in West Village, that was my— I just, I have, uh, like top 1% of severity of ADHD or ADD now. Like prescribed though, I'm prescribed the legal limit that a human is allowed to be prescribed to for Adderall.

And how many milligrams is that?

60 a day. Whoa. Yeah. Holy shit. Um, and it's just, it's really hard. I move fast, my mind is moving fast thinking about a bunch of things, but sometimes it's a— it moves— things get done slow because there's so much like— and if you're— if I'm not running, like, it's, it's just such a weird relief.

Do you wear headphones when you run?

Yeah, sometimes I don't listen to music when I run.

Okay, I was just gonna ask if you've ever tried with nothing, like silence.

I will walk 40% of the time you see me have headphones and I'm not listening to anything.

I haven't worn headphones to exercise in probably over a year.

Really? No music? No music.

Yeah.

The funny part is it was my therapist that actually was the reason I started doing that, because I'm very ADHD as well, and I realized it was the only time in my life where I could not try to distract myself even if I tried. And so I'd be able to process all my unresolved thoughts while running.

I'm gonna give that a shot.

It's really uncomfortable the first couple times, I'm just warning you, but you got to try to push through it.

I'll try. If you get into the flow state of it after the first couple.

Yeah, I almost— I realized, like, I don't even know if I like running, or I just like the way it makes me feel mentally. So that's why I'm doing it.

For me, it's the latter for sure. Like, I don't particularly enjoy— like, I'm a long torso, short leg sort of guy. Like, I'm taking a lot of fucking steps to get through that 6 months, you know what I mean? I'm not gracefully galloping down like Bambi or something like that. But it's the— it's just the— it's like your body just releases, like, Yeah, so that's my non-negotiables for that. Um, non-negotiables is having blocked do not disturb times, you know what I mean?

For how long?

2 hours.

And is that a morning thing or an evening thing?

It depends on the— like Wednesdays, Wednesdays and Thursday, there's no do not disturbs. Pretty much calendars, just let's rock and roll and crush meetings. Friday is pretty much just blocked for, you know, like important, you know, like trying to close big deals and things that are going on internally, but Yeah, having downtime, running. Um, the routine's been hard, man. I think the last 90 days I've been in a hotel, the last 57, the last 90 days. And I'm shutting down. Like, after Monday I'm going home to Maine and then going to Charleston for a month, shutting down. I'm gonna get a trainer, like, and I'm no— no social media outside of what we're doing, the work there, dude. I'm just gonna send it for a month. No alcohol. Like, I'm not a huge drinker. I'll have a couple beers, watching the games, you know, blue-collar Maine guys and stuff, you know, watching the Celtics and shit. But like, it's buckle-down time. And then, you know, do the same over in Europe with my investors over there. So he's got a good like kind of startup nomad community.

Oh, amazing.

We're just going to do like a lot of like mental thinking and, you know, meditations and running. And it's going to be a summer of health for sure. It's great because it was a— it was a— I mean, you earned 3 years of unhealth. Yeah, 4 years of totally—

yeah.

Do you guys get it, dude? It's a fucking grind.

If Pression fails, why did that happen?

Oh my God. Um, well, define fail.

Exit for $5 million instead of a billion.

Yeah, well, then it'd be a down round. Nobody's giving up.

Yeah, I mean, I think, I think the outcome where no one gets paid. Why did that happen?

Um, if something happened to my— like, dude, Cody's the backbone.

It's fucked up because I feel the same way about Kieran.

Yeah, feel the same way.

Like someone's like, what's your— it's like dependency risk. My technical co-founder, it's like put a helmet and elbow pads on that guy when he crosses the street.

You ever seen the movie that's called The Imitation Game?

It's about Alan Turing. Oh dude, Benedict Cumberbatch.

Um, it's about this guy Alan Turing who built this thing called Enigma, uh, or whatever it was, the broken Enigma. He built this machine that was able to decode what the Germans were saying. And he saw— he ended World War II, was one of the biggest drivers of that. Everybody was hating on him and they were trying to do their own research. Nobody touched that machine for years. It was just him. He knew the ins and outs of it like nobody else. Cody, my co-founder, there's no research paper that exists to what he's built. And nobody until recently has ever touched his code. Right? So reading it, it looks like a Chinese language. There's hundreds of thousands of lines of code, right, that are in there. And if something ever happened to him, it would be a very long time for somebody to ramp up on that.

But how do you think— that's— it's a— you bring up a really good point though. Like, at what phase in your business, if not now, do you figure out ways to like reduce that dependency risk, just in spirit of like healthy business practices? Cody, sounds crazy, but like, we hired, we hired, uh, shout out to—

he's been probably 2 months, 2 or 3 months, a guy named Alan, brilliant PhD. Alan, Caitlin, and then we just recently hired our director of data science, Philip, who was the global head of engineering for Grubhub on all their data science models, PhD in linguistics from Stanford. He's like a— so now we're starting to pass over a lot of Cody's knowledge base documentation and getting that foundation laid out. And Cody's now starting to go research our retail model. So any brands out there, Shopify or Salesforce on Amazon and on retail as well, We are now going to be partnering with 5 to 10 brands that are, that will be able to measure the impact of their digital marketing spend, of all their marketing spend. And how does that impact your D2C store, your marketplaces, and retail as well? And so I was kind of looping that in there. If Cody's now starting to democratize the education on the model and go build the retail model What are some of the crazy metrics that you guys have seen? We— from like a client base?

Yeah.

Oh dude, I love the— he's actually calling me here tonight. I know I talk a lot about Hexclad, but they are— they become our family. They're a great brand. They're locked and loaded with us. But, um, we just came out with our second case study with Hexclad. Um, but, uh, the first one was, is, uh, they saw compared to their prior spend period, an 85% uptick of top-line revenue growth. And here's how crazy this was, dude. Like our saturation plots, right? You spend $2, $10, and you make $10. You spend $2 and you make $10. You can't expect to spend $2 million and make $10, right? Eventually it's going to saturate.

Of course.

And so, but Facebook was telling something that was rather misleading, right? About where they're kind of— we said that the campaign could either scale up or down. I'm not gonna go too much into strategy or whatever, but we were able to identify a spend point that our model said is like, here's the right spend point, and then here's how you should reallocate that budget across other campaigns.

Like don't spend above this number on this campaign and take that— Yeah, and take the rest of the money and reallocate elsewhere.

Yeah. And click a button in 45 seconds, it spits that back out, which theoretically in the past when they first started, they would run these once a year, quarterly, monthly, maybe some people are doing it weekly, 45 seconds campaign level output ready to rock and roll. And it was tangible, measurable results. Good American, Ryan Slyper was their former chief revenue officer of Good American, Khloé Kardashian's brand, who's now an investor and advisor of the company. He's like, dude, I've been doing this for 20 years. He's like, there's no way you're gonna onboard me in 20 minutes and have this models trained in 2 days. If you go to the Good American use case, says we onboarded in 16 minutes on Monday. We're live on the platform on Wednesday, ran our first optimization on Thursday, and over the next week we had the highest website traffic that we've seen in a year. It's like real-world, measurable, tangible shit that like you can tie onto. And that's why like we don't sign annual contracts. We'll say to everyone, hey dude, listen, we're going to give you 3 months. You can opt out after 3 months. You're going to have a Slack channel. We're going to meet with you weekly and we are going to to do two things. Qualitatively, we're going to make you feel more confident in the top of funnel spend. Quantitatively, if this thing is not paying back for itself over, you know, multiple times over again, jump off the platform, right?

That's the coolest part, especially when you're building a data company, is you're like, all right, now I have what I know I need to become a marketing company. Now it's like, how do I just make sure every single person in the world knows we exist?

Yeah, that's where he comes in.

Yeah, but it's like you did— I mean, everyone will tell you a different part of it's the hard part, but I think you did the hard part where it's like you can prove statistical significance with real brands to now it's just like, how do you get it out to the masses in a cost-effective way?

One, dude, one, it's so great to see, like, again, like, in 80% of our business is coming from agencies. It's coming from my LinkedIn now. Like, I got hit up by a brand I've been trying to get into for months and their SVP of omnichannel reached out to me. It was like, dude, I'm seeing the stuff you're doing on LinkedIn.

Let's go.

Uh, we're meeting next week.

I just got one of those for the first time too.

It's a great feeling, right?

Big brands, like, I've been following your content for a while. Like, we're moving over to Shopify. Shopify, would love to talk.

It's awesome. And that's real-world tangible results, right? And like, people wouldn't be migrating their website, dude, doing millions of dollars, like, if you didn't have, one, a compelling value prop, two, a simple product, and three, you know, actual results of what they can expect to benefit from.

I love that note on your pricing strategy. I mean, that is like customer-centric pricing 101. I think a lot of founders go— we were talking about this before— like that mid-whip meme curve.

Yeah.

And early days of Verbatim, we started like 2.5 years ago. I was just like, month to month, we got to prove it out every single month. And then over time, probably a year in, I talked to too many investors. I was like, 6-month annual discounts. And now I'm just like, just if it's working, let's keep going. And then if it doesn't, we can pause, go allocate your money elsewhere.

I love that. It's nice.

We're, we're the opposite. But that's because there's a lot of upfront work that goes into our process that it doesn't make financial sense for us to hypothetically do all of that. That's for month 3. You're like, you know what, like, we're going to switch. It's like, it doesn't make sense. We're rolling out our self-serve product the next couple of months. That'll be month to month, but the Hero offering is annual.

You have to do that though. There's no other way because it's, you have to mitigate and hedge the risk of like the upfront human capital that takes to be deployed. And you know, a lot of the other Mmm providers, there's a lot of humans that are involved, right? And that's why they're pushing at the minimum a 6-month contract, largely going to a year, because there's a lot of people that have to get integration set up and they have to train models and tweak models and customize models. Our value props, what we can do, this is in 16 minutes you're going to click some buttons and the math is going to do the rest of the infrastructure. What is going to evolve now, like I was just meeting with a, you know, multibillion-dollar retailer this morning at the conference. And like we can cover 80% of their integrations, but point and click. But there's channels out there that they're like, dude, we need to have this data in this model. So now we're going to have to start evolving our kind of like forward deploy engineer as you go up market. To get some of these other datasets. And so it'll likely change our— the pricing structure will evolve. Smaller brands, boom, boom, boom, click and go. But larger brands, I think that's where— dude, I have a question. What did you do before Verbatim?

I was in VC.

You were in venture before this?

For like 3 years straight out of college.

Really?

Yeah.

I was a glorified BD associate.

I wasn't some—

every young analyst out there says they're an investor. And it's like, no, you're just running around trying to source deals, none of which will actually get done. Yeah, um, but I was running a— like every 22-year-old VC, I started an interview series and a newsletter because like that's what you're told to do.

Yeah.

And I got really good at cold emailing people.

Really?

And I convinced, uh, like hundreds of founders, a bunch of brands, but also like Mark Cuban, Rob Dyrdek, Tim Draper, Brad— like crazy names in both venture and consumer. And I was just doing little like health and wellness interviews with them. But every week for like 2 years, I showed up on LinkedIn with my face next to like Mark Cuban's and Rob Dyrdek's face. And so you can obviously see the analogy with like B2B case studies, right?

But don't knock how like they tell everyone to do that, but not everyone can do it. Do you know, you know, not to cut you off, but like Zara from Headline. Yeah, she, she's got like all these, she's got like 4 newsletters. Yeah, she's got like 4 newsletters and all these crazy communities. And I'm like, that's a superpower.

Oh, it is. It is.

There's a lot of analysts who want to try to do that, but none can really get to that level.

It is the— it's easy to start, right? Consistency is really hard. But I did that for like 2 years.

How did you craft— crack the cold? Question number 1, how did you crack the cold email? What did you do different than— 2, do you feel cold email is still viable, a viable channel in B2B SaaS?

I mean, it depends. I don't think it's viable in B2B SaaS. It depends on your contract size. And so the same way, like, we don't do SEO, but I'm a big fan of SEO if your contract size isn't like $200K. If your contract size is $200K, people aren't starting their buying decision there. Same thing. They're not going to start the buying decision on email. But if you're like $50 a month per consumer, that may work. But basically I kept doing that. And then all my founder friends that are like coming out of YC raised $3 or $4 million. They were like, this looks cool. We need go-to-market content. Can you just like freelance for us? So I did. I worked with a couple and kept getting referrals. And then at a certain point I was just like, damn, we have like 8 clients. I love— I need to start this.

Such a good—

And so that was like 2 and a half years ago. And like year 1 and 2 was just like me and a handful of kids straight out of college who were like, great writers, really good English programs. And then over the past year is when we started landing Fortune 500 logos. And that's when we really brought in a leadership team like Claire, who you know, she's our VP of Ops. When Claire and Will go back to back to back to back, it's the funniest. They're just extremely fast workers. The past year we really kind of changed as a real business, 'cause we're like 24, 25 people now.

Yeah, I mean, it's cool to hear, like, dude, you sit there, GoPuff and you get a bird's-eye view of a problem that needs to be solved, right? You see that, right? And then you're in VC, it's like, hey, go do this. And I did it really well and it turned into a business. And I think my story is, you know, you're burned out and want to try to build and sell something, right?

And now we just sit on couches and talk shit on podcasts.

No, just the way it goes. It's a circle of life. Oh, you know, I'm not mad, but it's, it's cool to hear like other people's story with that stuff. Like, it's, um, you just, you live and you learn and you make mistakes and you have ambitions and goals and some of them check out and some of them don't. But like, my dad just says it perfectly. He's like, you're like a— he's like, you're like a fucking Roomba. He's like, you just— with like a little hole in a wall, he's like, keep going. You just keep bouncing from wall to wall for a year. Dude, I incorporated 2018, I quit in 2019, and we didn't start generating revenue, true revenue until September of last year. Wow. Right?

It's a long time.

It's a long time.

So cool though.

You put everything into 401k, boom, gone. Like, I dumped everything into it. Like, it was a wild experience, and it came down to like the, the brink end. And, you know, it's like you hit that wall and you go into a new room, and then you hit the next walls. But you have a car, right? In that car, you pick somebody up, right? You go into that next room and your car gets a little bigger. You pick somebody up, right, that needs to do this part of the— to keep the wheels moving. Some people get out of that car and then, you know, now you're kind of moving towards a big bus that has little departments within each bus, all driving towards that, you know, same direction and North Star.

Yeah, dude, this was awesome.

It was fun.

I had a lot of fun in this conversation.

Yeah, it was great.

Oh yeah, thank you for coming on.

Talk to that camera and tell people where they can find you and Pression.

Yeah. So Michael True, T-R-U-E, like the opposite of false on LinkedIn. Prescient. We're going to be doing a new domain change because it's awful. It's prescient, P-R-E-S-C-I-E-N-T-A-I.io.

It bothered me when I first saw it.

It bothers me too, because I think we're going to do like tryprescient.com, getprescient.com, something like that. Yeah. So I'm judging. Keep an eye out for the new website. If anybody plays golf, Ben Sharf, please reach out. Anybody on Shopify, Amazon retail, absolute no-brainer to talk. Or just email me directly, mike@precient-ai.io. Shout out to Maggie. My calendar sees her. She'll hook it up. We'll get a time to speak.

Hell yeah. Thank you, man.

It's fun. I appreciate you having come by.